Thursday, May 31, 2012

This one is very close to our final 1.1 official build (after which we'll start working on the betas for 1.2, so never fear).

Along with some fixes and tweaks, this version also includes a new music track, 99 new room templates, and a new semi-secret miniboss. Whew!

Mainly we are looking to see if there are any other critical issues that need to be taken care of prior to 1.1, and that's pretty much it until Monday. Then we're back onto new spells and missions and such, which we're excited to get back to.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

This one is our eighth solely-polish release prior to the next official version, which will be coming out midday tomorrow and dubbed 1.1. There's at least one more release coming tonight, and possibly two (only two if we break something, though).

This one is smaller in terms of the volume of fixes, but it has some really important ones including several core changes that fix multiple bugs that various people were experiencing.

The reason we're doing such frequent releases the last few days is that we want each change to get the maximum amount of time in the hands of players to make sure that we're hopefully not breaking something right before going into a major release.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

We're excited to share that A Valley Without Wind has been selected to be a part of the IndieCade Showcase at E3 next week. A really pleasant surprise, as it's something we didn't even consider as a possibility when we submitted the game to the festival earlier this year.

Along with AVWW, 19 other excellent indies will be on display including The Binding of Isaac, J.S. Joust, Prom Week, and a bunch of games I'm just now discovering and look forward to checking out.

The booth will be located in the Concourse Foyer at the Los Angeles Convention Center (level 1 in the West Hall entrance). I'll be hanging around there all three days (June 5-7), so for those attending feel free to stop by for a chat, to check out the game, or both!

Check back next week, as we have some good stuff in store with the event coinciding with Valley's official 1.1 release.

This one is our sixth solely-polish release prior to the next official version, which will be coming out midday tomorrow and dubbed 1.1. Lots and lots of balance tweaks and bugfixes in here, and more is planned for 2-3 more releases throughout today.

This one has a few standout changes, in particular:

- Freefall mission balance progression is now what we consider "final, pending feedback from you." So please, if it seems off then let us know.

- Fixed several things related to small entities not being able to fire certain spells properly, or certain spells sometimes passing through some objects, etc.

- Lava Escape missions now scale up as you complete more of them, but start much easier than they did before, so you can ease into them now.

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

This one is our third solely-polish release prior to the next official version, which will be coming out probably late tomorrow night and dubbed 1.1. Lots more balance tweaks in particular in this one, and it's probably our last for the night unless Keith gets in a few last things.

This one has two standout changes:
- Much improved seeding logic for the continents and missions in several ways.
- Much improved Things You Should Do advice in the planning menu for new players.

Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.042-1.043 are now out, fixing another world deserialization bug and removing a debug message that accidentally got left on in 1.041.

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

This one is our second solely-polish release prior to the next official version, which will be coming out late this week and dubbed 1.1. Lots and lots of balance tweaks and bugfixes in here, and a bit more to come later tonight.

This one has a few standout changes, in particular:
- A fix to something that was making some worlds unreadable in recent versions (though it looks like we have one more of these to do).
- Many improvements to make the Crafting Grimoire more informative and helpful.
- 42 really cool new rooms by Benmiff
- Drastically lowered crafting costs for high-tier spells (see release notes for details)

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

This one is our first solely-polish release prior to the next official version, which will be coming out late this week and dubbed 1.1. Lots and lots of balance tweaks and bugfixes in here, and more to come later tonight.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Our good friends at Mode 7 Games have released the Red expansion for their tactical heaven Frozen Synapse. They've added co-op, and a new campaign, and a new multiplayer mode, and...well, a ton of good stuff. It's absolutely jam-packed, and does more than just slap a fresh coat of (red) paint on one of the better indie games in recent memory.

Red's available now both through Mode 7 themselves and on Steam (both offering 15% off during the first week of release). The base game is also 50% off through launch week.

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

This one is our first one since the Memorial Day holiday yesterday in the US. It includes some interesting new changes for bosses, as well as three new spells, along with two new elite minibosses, plus some key fixes.

We're pretty much out of time to put in new features for 1.1, so we're going to be focusing more on polish (meaning fixes and balance) for the next few days. The official 1.1 release will be late this week, and then we'll get cracking on 1.2 -- we have tons of stuff planned for that that simply wouldn't fit into 1.1.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.038 is out with a fix to two unhandled exceptions that could appear in a wide variety of situations in the prior version. Sorry about that!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Friday, May 25, 2012

This one is all kinds of awesome, if I do say so. First of all, there's a new music track that is just really wicked cool. Live electric guitar, and great composition both -- nice.

Then there's a bunch of improvements to various things like enemy seeding and things like T-Rexes getting stuck in tiny stairwells and such. And multiplayer fixes like falling straight through mines without touching them, or your NPCs getting stuck during rescue missions. Also the new upgrade enchants now cost 30x less than before, making them not a grind to collect at the start.

It's kind of a greatest-hits of a lot of the things that have been annoying people, I think, when it comes to the miscellaneous small fixes here. Monday is Memorial Day and so we won't be working that day, but on Tuesday and Wednesday that sort of focus on polish and balance is going to be most of what remains prior to 1.1 official being released.

The Deep's Overhaul
The mechanics of the deep were always temporary and kind of placeholdery. I made a note of that at the time we put in the +2 tiers thing and the darkness thing, as we'd basically run out of time. Anyway, now there are basically fiveish new types of enemies that are used in The Deep, and they are all really strong and scary.
So strong, in fact, it's like they had +2 tiers even though that mechanic has now been removed from the deep (along with the darkness effect on spells and enemies). Why the shift? Well, migration of course! Nothing is allowed to migrate into the deep anymore, but if monsters from the deep start migrating out into the surrounding lands that's quite a fearsome thing to see!

I have to say, the miasma bats are a new favorite enemy of mine, mainly just because I love their visual. Although the entropy hoppers that the dark dragons spawn are also really interesting, too.

Lots Of Changes To Freefall Missions
These missions have gotten a big facelift based on feedback from you folks. The missions themselves have proved to be really popular with lots of people -- but also brutally hard. This release updates the difficulty to not be so extreme anymore, although further tiering will still be needed come Tuesday.

I just ran out of time to keep working on this specific mission today, but it's getting close. What you're looking at now is pretty close to what I would consider the "hardest version" of the freefall missions, and then we just need some step-downs from that so that you get eased up to that level. If folks still feel like this is too hard for the hardest level of them, though, then let me know.

All Time Periods Now Have Unique Bonuses
Previously it was just limited to some of the time periods having some special bonuses like darkvision for the Draconites or the Fast Runner buff for the bronze age characters.

Well, now all the different time periods have their unique bonuses in place and they seem reasonably well balanced -- I'm sure this will evolve over time, but for a first pass I'm really pleased with how this turned out.

The ice age characters and medieval characters are now my personal favorites since they have some melee reduction and also some serious knockback reduction. But then again the extra two upgrade enchant points on the contemporary characters is pretty crazy powerful. As is the mana regen and extra mana of the time of magic characters, which are even more extreme now than they used to be.

Of course, if you find scouting buildings to be slow or tedious, an industrial revolution character will now make that go much faster. And the pre-industrial characters are now something of a cross between Luigi and Princess from Mario 2 in how they handle -- I think that's pretty fitting for their style of dress, haha.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.033 is now out with some key bugfixes mainly relating to bosses not spawning properly.

UPDATE:1.034 is now out with one fix to some inventory management stuff throwing exceptions in MP. Apparently. Never could duplicate it, but the error log was clear enough for now.

UPDATE:1.035 is now out with some more bugfixes, including a lockup, sudden-death on characters at inappropriate times, and a missing lieutenant. Also 10 new overlord boss rooms, which I'm sure is welcome news.

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Big things happening these days. A Valley Without Wind has seen several more additions and refinements over the past week as we approach the 1.1 (and first official) update for the game. We also have a pretty cool announcement we've been sitting on for a few days that hopefully we'll be able to share before the weekend, or at least by early next week. We'll see.

One press item we wanted to highlight regarding AVWW: Vagary TV's Indie Game Review podcast. In the inaugural episode the game is reviewed by the two hosts and then Chris joins for the interview portion.

Other happenings in the indie world we wanted to quickly mention:

The Because We May week has kicked off, where developers can and have freely reduced (or in a few cases increased) the prices on their games. There's a ton of indie devs taking part, and although we're not actively involved, you can be sure we're passively participating by pricing our games at their normal price during the week; because we may. ;)

Our pal Gnome points us to the Bundle In A Box Adventure Bundle. That goes through June 6th and includes a bunch of solid indie adventure games such as Gemini Rue and Size Five's Zombie Cow efforts. It also has The Sea Will Claim Everything, which people keep mentioning how awesome it is though I haven't had a chance yet to play.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

This one is our second release of the day, but it's not just minor fixes this time. Sure, there are a variety of fixes both major and minor. But there are also some substantial improvements to how enemy-dropped consciousness shards work AND a new mission type.

The new Boss Delve mission is nothing that complicated, but it's welcome variety for the early game in particular, which was something we wanted to be sensitive to. Also, it lets you kill two birds with one stone when it comes to gathering gems and arcane ingredients, whatever your current tier/continent/skill is. The new style of vertical cave structure of these missions makes them particularly fun to spelunk down into, as well, I think.

Oh, and as part of this version the state of equipped enchants are now synced between players in multiplayer. That sounds boring, but the key thing it means is this: the longstanding issue where you couldn't see light sources being emitted from another player's enchant is now resolved.

That means that one player can now light the way while others follow with enchants that aren't bound to light. Or it means that with a group of players the light is pushed back even further as they all spread out, giving a distinct visual advantage to a large group of players.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

This one has a laundry list of fixes and tweaks to it, including a few new lobby and settings options that may interest you.

It also continues to improve the ships that have been doing "well" in the Worst Unit polls. An old favorite ship of mine, the Teleport Battlestation, has been one of those that has gotten the buff this time around. Those have been tricky forever, basically, because they tend to be either overpowered defensive powerhouses, or expensive bulky things that don't really do enough damage to warrant their cost. Here's hoping this brings them a lot closer!

Also fixed in this version was a bug with the Dyson Sphere that was causing it to basically take a vacation in the prior version. Now it will be back in full force, so watch out for that.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

This one is another really cool and major one -- but I've learned my lesson. We're releasing this earlier in the day, and then planning another release later tonight with smaller changes and fixes, so that if there are any issues with this one they don't go untended overnight (or keep me up when I'm trying to get sleep instead).

Anyway, this release has a ton of changes and improvements, many of them small but notable. The list on the release notes is pretty long and varied, so I won't even try to summarize that here. But I will highlight four specific major features:

Enchants View Filtering
Now whenever you click an enchant or an enchant slot, it darkens all the other slots/enchants that are not related to it. Click an empty inventory slot to restore the normal brightness. This makes managing large inventories full of enchants vastly easier!Character Select Screen Improvements, And Re-Rolling Characters
There's a whole host of changes here, so be sure and see the release notes (or just check it out in-game). But the basic idea is that there is no longer a scrolling list of 6-18 characters to choose from. Instead it just always gives you a non-scrolling selection of 4 that you can more quickly compare, and there is a re-roll button that lets you get a different set of 4 if you don't like any of the ones you were first given.
Added to this, it also now has a filter for time period -- you can leave it on Show All, or just get 4 characters from a time period of your choosing. If you know you want a character of a certain time period, this plus the re-roll option makes it incredibly, vastly, enormously, gargantuanly easier to get a character you are happy with without a lot of faffing about or suicides.Three New Enchant Slots Take The Place Of Upgrade Stones
Upgrade stones are now gone, as they simply weren't working out as well as we'd hoped for a long litany of reasons. See the release notes for all the gory details.

Taking their place are three new enchant slots: Health, Mana, and Attack. Sound familiar? It's basically the upgrade stone system you already know, just streamlined and moved into the enchants interface. So now there are 9 overall enchant slots in the inventory, and these three new ones work a bit differently (having a budget that is shared between them, a few rules on when you can swap them out, etc).

The net effect of these changes is to give you more flexibility with your characters, and not penalize mistakes. Also letting a single character switch roles more easily, although their base stats still play into what their ultimate role is likely to be.

Health And Mana Rebalancement
When it comes to mana, you can upgrade that more easily now -- base characters don't have any more of it, but it's easier to make a high-mana character via upgrades rather than being forced to use a time of magic character.

For characters in general, they all now have more health, making death hopefully less frequent and the upgrades to the first tier or two of the health stat (formerly via stones, now via the enchants) less vital. The upgrades variance is now lowered somewhat in response to this, to make it so that there aren't thousands of percentage points difference between one character's health and another's.

Death is supposed to happen from time to time, but not be something that's constant. It's also supposed to be something that is the culmination of a series of mistakes rather than one slip into the lava. These changes help bring the balance back into line with those design goals, but I'm sure that more tweaks and refinements will be needed with time.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

This one is really cool, but I have largely run myself out of time for the day and so I'll just leave you to see the release notes on your own. A few notes:

1. There's a new Freefall mission type. It's all kinds of awesome (player suggestion, by the way). However, the balance on that is preliminary at best -- by which I mean "it's way too hard at the moment." We did not get to finish our unit testing of balance on these missions, although we did finish the other forms of testing on it. There were simply too many other things in this release to delay it until tomorrow, though, so what you've got is an unbalanced new mission until that next release -- sorry about that.

2. One of the big killer changes in this one that meant we really needed to release tonight were a selection of balance improvements as well as a pretty major CPU usage improvement. I decided that having these things in your hands earlier rather than later was more important than waiting until the Freefall mission was pristine.

3. The Lieutenant Towers are way way cooler and more interesting now. And also have this new thing called Area Enchantments, along with a new kind of guardian power scroll you can use to bypass them. Much less grindy this way.

4. In general, the balance on the traps has been particularly improved, which we know some folks were really looking forward to.

And with that, I have to run for the night. More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE: 1.028 fixes an unhandled exception that would get thrown when trying to view the enchants inventory.

UPDATE: 1.029 fixes two other unhandled exceptions, or at least should -- I didn't have world files, so I was working off error files without line numbers only. I saw a few places where errors could arise if the game state was in some edge cases, though, so the preventative measures I put in there will hopefully be the solutions that were needed to fix the two bugs in question. And with that, I'm really going to go sleep now, so hopefully things are clean until morning. Apologies for the trouble!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Friday, May 18, 2012

This one has some various small tweaks and improvements, including to the balance of shields and infestations. Well, actually, depending on the player they might find those two balance things rather substantial (the former hopefully not too negatively, and the latter quite positively I'm sure).

More excitingly, however, are the two big features of this release:

Foot Enchants and Elven Boots
This stems from a lot of discussion about the jump-related leg enchants and how they basically made all other leg enchants obsolete by comparison. At one point there was talk of nerfing the jump-related enchants, but we realized that would really impact the fun-factor more than anything else.
So what we've done instead is split out the jump-related enchants to no longer be leg enchants; they are now foot enchants instead, and occupy their own slot. This makes it so that the various leg enchants now compete with one another on a much more even playing field, and the jump-related stuff just competes with itself on the foot slot.

But given that not all players are enamored of having double and triple jump (though those players are the minority for sure), we also added a new kind of enchant to the foot slot: elven boots. These are kind of "jack of all trade minor improvement" enchants that give you a variety of boosts in exchange for not taking the awesome jump enchants. We expect that most players will utterly avoid the boots, but some players have already stated their desire for them -- so everybody wins.

Totally An Aside: The In-Joke Behind Elven Boots
"Elven Boots" play into the ending of the Tidalis story campaign in a funny way, so I won't spoil that. But I don't think I've ever publicly told the story of what the joke behind Elven Boots is.

Back before my son was born, when my wife and I had time for 5-7 hour boardgame sessions, we used to play a lot of Descent: Journeys In The Dark with both her family and mine. Really, really fun game, by the way. Also really, really long. I made some variant rules called "Fast Tactics" to shrink our play sessions from more like 9-12 hours down to a 4-7 hour range.

Anyway, I always play as the overlord in those games -- basically, the DM. Or Zargon, if you're familiar with the also-awesome HeroQuest from way back in the day. I loved that as a kid, and Descent is kind of the grown-up version of HeroQuest.

But I really digress! We were at the end of about a 7-hour campaign through a dungeon, using the fast tactics variant rules. The party was very weary and weak, and there was this massive skeletal dragon that they still had to kill. It was looking slightly iffy, and everybody wanted to have a quick end to this because we'd already been playing so long and were getting pretty bleary.

Lo and behold, in this dragon's room there was a gold treasure chest, which usually means some pretty wicked awesome loot -- but it's randomly drawn, so you never know what specifically it will be.

My dad was playing as a teleporting mage, and since the chest was on the other side of a pit of water he was the only one who could reach it without the dragon killing him en route. So the party sends him over there: teleport across the water, then jump down in a pit (taking damage) and open the chest from out of the pit. But at least he's safe from the dragon in the pit (which would have probably killed him next turn otherwise).

He had to wait a turn to actually open the chest from the pit, though, so the suspense built as the dragon and the rest of the party duke it out a mild bit without the aid of their main wizard. Finally my dad's next turn rolls around and he opens the chest, fingers crossed for some sort of "Wand Of Nuclear Destruction" as he put it -- though he'd have settled for some sort of Sword of Awesomeness or something that he at least could have brought back to one of the other characters for them to slay the dragon with. Teamwork for the win!

He drew... you guessed it... Elven Boots. These were something to let a single character move slightly faster -- utterly and completely useless to someone who already teleports, I must add. His anquished cries of "Eleven boots? Elven boots!?" sent the rest of us really over the edge into laughter. I think we pretty much called it a night at that point, and ever since any sort of disappointment in a game like that has been accompanied by the proclamation "Elven boots!?"

Probably a lot funnier if you were actually there (and a little punchy after 7 hours of straight play). But that's the meaning behind the term elven boots: that useless thing that you are so disappointed to get.

For most players who get these for the foot slot, that's exactly what these are going to be because they certainly aren't going to give up their jump enhancements. On the other hand, for a few players these will actually be the awesome alternative they were looking for. The great news is that basically all of the legs enchants were being viewed as elven boots by most players before, and now all of those powerslides and movement buffs and all that good stuff are actually relevant again.

That Other Big Feature I Mentioned: Two New Monsters
Yeah, sorry about the overlong side story there. Anyway, the other big new thing in this release is two new monsters both for the abandoned towns. And thus the withdrawal of espers from yet another region! Hooray! The ubiquitous espers just got less ubiquitous, as we've been working on for the last few weeks.
Oh, and of course I think the two new enemies are actually pretty cool -- both are small and flying, to basically fill the same broad niche that the espers previously did in this region. However, the feel of these and the way you fight them is really super different and I'm quite pleased with how that changes the feel. I'm a little worried that they might be too hard for the start of the game, so let me know if we need to tone those down and then make some elites of them or something.

More to come next week. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.024 has been released to fix an extreme slowdown problem with waterfall-heavy caverns.

UPDATE:1.025 has been released to fix an issue where the player could not jump off top-solid platforms in the background in the prior version.

UPDATE:1.026
has been released to fix one more performance bug, plus it also adds a couple of new abilities for neutral skelebots, neutral draconites, and the bronze age characters.

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

This one has yet a few more changes to the Journey To Perfection missions, although I'm not quite done there yet. These now have a more natural progression in difficulty, ranging from "pretty easy" to "pretty insane," though, so that's fun.

One of our longest-requested features that we somehow never got around to adding (despite it being requested as far back as version 0.501) was some better scouting of the chunk in the minimap. Mainly better correlation between what you see on the screen and what gets revealed on the minimap; previously you could see something on the screen but still have it blanked out on the minimap, which was super frustrating and made exploring little corners of caves a chore. Not anymore!

Aside from a few general bugfixes and tweaks, the other big thing in this release are a variety of new infestation types. Two broad new categories of traps are now in place for interior and underground infestations: blade traps and spike traps. Each of which has at least three variants.

And then there are also four broad different categories of "dangerfalls," by which we mean waterfalls, lavafalls, icefalls, and miasmafalls. These each have their own respective sub-variants and also react to the platforming difficulty you've selected. Timing-based waterfalls/lavafalls have been something I've wanted to have in the game since mid-alpha almost a year ago, so it's really cool to finally see these in play.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

The game looks (and is) fantastic already, plus he's aiming to provide a goodly amount of post-launch support for the title; with mod support first up on his list. You can purchase GTB now through Positech directly, on Steam, Gamersgate, or Impulse/GameStop.

On the Arcen front we have several new coverage pieces for Valley to pass along. Interviews, reviews, videos, and even some press showing up for our earlier titles.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

This one reworks the least-popular mission type to be more palatable. In this case, I'm speaking of Journey To Perfection missions, which are meant to be tense and fun hardcore combat challenges -- but which had a lot of platforming thrown in there as well, which threw things off quite a bit. Now the focus is more squarely on combat with these, and they seem a lot more fun.

All of the non-jumping-related leg enchants now give you a boost to your max mana, so there's a greater incentive to pick up something other than double or triple jump for your legs slot. We'll be having some more changes in that area before long, but for now this is a step in the right direction.

A couple of other player frustrations have also been addressed with this release. First of all, the puzzle rooms for getting the the mystery clues were really far too rare. They are now quite a bit more common and not always behind maze rooms. Secondly, the four most-basic settlement buildings can now be purchased via the opal guardian stone's store; it's still generally better to get these through missions, but when the random number generator hates you, you now have alternatives.

Oh, and two new music tracks! Both really cool ones in very different ways.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

This one is definitely our largest post-release update so far in terms of how it affects the overall feel of the game. The loot drops from enemies plus the opal guardian's store was also pretty huge, but this is bigger.

First off, the smaller stuff: a variety of bugfixes and tweaks, and some new graphics compression options that may or may not be of interest depending on how much RAM you have and if you tend to play for hours and hours at a go. And a few other neat things like "Small Rare Enchant Containers" that you can find out in the wild.

Streamlining?
The larger changes are all noted in detail here. Essentially, what we've done is removed "Civilization Progress (CP)," and instead made it so that you kill lieutenants in order to increase the continent tier. In short, we took out one mechanic that was a bit superfluous and complicating things needlessly, and are now making better use of a more interesting mechanic (lieutenants) to accomplish the same thing.

Another way to look at this is focused around missions themselves: you no longer have to worry about world map missions accidentally making the world arbitrarily harder (through CP) by completing too many of them. And the secret missions are no longer so grindy by giving you fewer rewards than the world map missions -- both kinds of missions now give you the same, higher, resource rewards.

Yet a third way of looking at this is in terms of overall game structure: previously you would bounce back and forth between missions and free exploration, then eventually kill all the lieutenants and the overlord pretty much in one long string. Now you bounce back and forth between missions and free exploration for as long as you like, then take on the lieutenant of your choice, then keep improving your stuff until you are ready to take down the overlord. Much better flow, that.

Strategic Difficulty Returns
Right now the strategic difficulty setting only affects one thing: how many tier orbs of each tier you can accumulate per continent. However, as we go further into post-release content there will be other things we do with this.

One of the cool things about CP and tier orbs being tied to one another in the prior system was that it forced an opportunity cost on you: you had to be efficient. The downside was, not everybody wants to play that way. And for those that do, it was not forcing that difficult of choices, really.

The strategic difficulty setting lets you choose how constrained you want to be: how much you want each unlocked spell to matter in terms of your overall strategy to defeat the overlord. Just like players have differing feelings on how hard the platforming and combat should be, so too has it become clear that players have different feelings on how hard those long-form decisions should be. This lets you set it to whatever is most fun for your particular tastes.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.020 is now out with a fix to the anachronism missions spawning crazy numbers of enemies in the prior version. Part of why I did the 1.019 release in the middle of the day was in case there were some severe issues that people found; I didn't want them going overnight if I could help it.

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Friday, May 11, 2012

This one has fewer new enemies than prior versions, but the enemies that it does have are pretty darn cool -- the Deepwoods Gargans are one of the neatest enemies we've added in my opinion.

There's also a variety of balance improvements in this version, plus a new spell scroll that allows you to turn yourself into a Micro-Rex. Finally something you can transmogrify yourself into beyond just a bat! Speaking of Micro-Rexes, those are also now something that you'll be encounter en-masse via one of the Elder T-Rex's attacks.

More to come on Monday and beyond. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

This one is, again, kind of all over the place. On the one hand there are some fixes for multiplayer plus some new admin commands to help with yet another anti-griefing case as well as to be able to rename either your character or your profile. Very useful.

On the other hand we've got some changes to make the transition to the second continent easier and less grindy when you're going for those early NPCs and settlement structures. To some extent I think it was a communications issue with players missing things that were actually already there, but we've done a great deal to make it more robust in general so that that doesn't come up.

Next up are three more enemies and a new miniboss. One of those enemy types actually has four variants, and another of them has eighteen variants. So, yeah.

Also new this release is the concept of chunks having "infestations" of hostile background stuff. If you don't want spoilers I won't give them in this summary. But suffice it to say, some of the new enemies don't seed like other enemies -- they either show up like the crashed landspeeder or dread gazebo as part of region-specific seeding, or they show up during an infestation in addition to normal enemies.

Players have been asking for more environmental dangers and traps and such for a while, as well as more variance on a per-chunk basis as opposed to a per-region basis, and the infestations provide us for a pretty interesting vector for providing both in one. We'll be doing more with it over time, but right now there are three broad types of infestations that can happen, each with three differing severities and some region-specific tie-ins.

Sorry that was kind of vague, but given this is a game partly about exploration I thought you might prefer just finding it in the game yourself. If not, then have at the release notes themselves, because all the details are there!

More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.017 is now out and improves the balance on the new infestations based on early feedback, as well as making the monster whips work properly in multiplayer.

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

This one is a bit all over the place. It includes one new enemy and one new miniboss, but there were five other enemies and one other miniboss that we worked on today that didn't quite make it into this release.

Instead of being focused solely on new monsters, this version packs in a number of other miscellaneous improvements -- see the release notes for the full rundown. The largest groups of improvements have to do with balance on a few of the enchant progressions (to prevent some exploits that players found), as well as a variety of general improvements to the terrain generation of ocean regions. We know that's something folks have been wanting for a while, so we took a chance to slip that in.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.014 has some various fixes related to the prior version. Sigh -- sorry about this, it isn't our norm to be in this pattern. But that's part of why we do betas of even post-release content!

UPDATE:1.015
has a fix for a fairly uncommon unhandled exception in the prior version that we nonetheless didn't want out there in the wild (there are enough players now that even an uncommon exception gets hit pretty fast). This one also fixes a longer-standing issue with having too many robots to choose from compared to other time periods.

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

This one is focused on everybody's biggest complaint with the game these days: enemy variety. Four new enemies have been added, and two new minibosses have been added. There were already something like 40-50 enemies in the game, but given that many of them were unlockables or limited to just specific region types, that made them feel thinner on the ground than they really were.

In particular espers were annoyingly ubiquitous. Well, espers are no longer native to the grasslands, since those now have enough other monsters to take their place now. Espers will also be withdrawing from various other time periods as more monsters are introduced.

In general, adding more monsters will be our major focus for most of this week unless something else comes up, and then after that the focus is probably going to be on more exploration rewards plus more mission types. That's the current plan, anyhow!

Check out the release notes if you want the goods on the new monsters, or just wait and experience them in-game if you want to avoid spoilers. There's also a number of notable bugfixes, including that "stuck in urban crawler" one and a fix to an exploit that made shields ridiculously overpowered in journey to perfection missions.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.012 fixes a bug that was causing exceptions to be thrown in some worlds when missions were completed in the prior version. Sorry about that!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Monday, May 7, 2012

This one has been several weeks in the making partly due to all the increased workload from the release of our newest game A Valley Without Wind, and partly due to the fact that this release is unusually large.

First of all, and least excitingly -- but still pretty exciting -- there are some general bugfixes and balance tweaks. Among those are some fixes to the longtime-bothersome bugs relating to alt-tabbing out of the game and the key getting stuck down, or the game scrolling off into the middle of space while you were tabbed out. And there was much rejoicing!

But that's not what's really cool about this release. Previously, Minor Factions were always a boolean on/off sort of feature. You either played with (for example) marauders or you didn't. That was okay, but it wasn't really a very good way to give you the sort of custom-tailored experience you'd really want.

Now most of the minor factions include a sliding scale from 0-10. Zero represents those minor factions being completely absent, and, um, 4 is the equivalent of what being fully-on used to be. So hardcore players really have a whole lot of new ways to bring themselves pain if they crank it up to 10, while the less masochistic among us can actually tune it down to the 1-3 range. All in all: a lot more flexibility.

Speaking of flexibility, there are also now lobby setup scripts. These let us or players define templates for "just give me some settings that match X desire." This is still in its early stages, but given how many lobby options there are these days we really felt this was needed in order to make it so that new players could jump into a variety of types of scenarios that experienced players find fun. And so that experienced players can share exact scenarios with one another more easily without literally sharing a savegame, come to that.

Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 4.000 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 4.000 or later, you can download that here.

Friday, May 4, 2012

This one is focused on the remainder of the largest complaints we've had so far. Once again, the results are pretty darn exciting if I do say so.

Supply Depot / Meteor Storm Missions Overhaul
So, these were definitely the most-hated missions.They took too long, had too little strategy if you did certain things, or were impossibly hard if you did other things. Not a good balance. There were also a lot of glitches with the stacks of crates in multiplayer in particular.

Well -- that's all changed now! There are no longer crates at all in fact, but rather there are four larger "supply stash" objects that you have to protect. And the new catch is that you have to protect all of them rather than just one, which really brings this a lot closer to its original Missile Command roots.

Enemies are still in abundance to bother you personally, but they won't mess with the supply stashes anymore -- that means that the meteors are now the sole threat that can actually cause you to lose the mission. The monsters are just there to kill you and make life more difficult.

There's now a handy heads-up display showing the health of all the supply stashes, so that you can protect the ones that are in more danger. There's also way fewer meteors over a much shorter period of time, and fewer monsters also. It's still a very hectic sort of "defend the hill" vibe to this mission, and they are quite a challenge... but it's world's better and more interesting than it was before.

We'll of course be very interested in feedback on the new mechanics from folks, but at worst I think you'll find that these are a giant step in the right direction. Personally I think these are pretty cool now, albeit still one of the more difficult mission types.

Trash Mob Loot Drops
Okay, so folks really wanted trash mobs to drop something other than just health. This came up during beta, but died down after a lackluster implementation involving the six-colored consciousness shards. Then we switched to health-only drops, and players who had been through most of the beta with us seemed placated because the alternative was clearly worse.
Then we hit 1.0 and of course now there's thousands of new players, and the strong consensus has been that they want more of a reward for killing trash mobs. "Otherwise, what's the point?" has been the general sentiment. Of course, then there's a smaller contingent who prefers avoidance and has been arguing the other side... people can't ever agree on anything, not that I'm particularly complaining.

Keith has always been in the camp that he wanted to see loot drops from minor enemies anyhow. I've been the one who was so opposed to it, because of some of the experiences during beta. For instance, when the rewards were tied to the monsters themselves there was no way to decouple the reward and the challenge.

So if you had three bosses guarding some cool treasure, you'd inevitably get 3x the normal boss reward PLUS the treasure, which just made all sorts of trouble for a challenge/reward system. And it's more complex than that, too, but I won't bore you with the details -- I believe those are still somewhere in the forums from back in November or thereabouts.

Anyway, something occurred to me yesterday when Josh brought up the fact that "enemies should drop loot" was starting to reach a fever pitch of popular opinion: my concerns really had to do with bosses and vengeful ghosts and missions. So the compromise is easy: during freeform exploration, trash mobs now drop the consciousness shards as well as the health they were already dropping (not either/or like it was in the beta, as that was a big part of the problem then).

However, during missions you don't get rewards from killing even the trash mobs. During a mission your sole focus is the completion of the mission, so that makes sense. Outside the mission you're fighting and exploring and doing whatever other activities interest you, and I can understand players wanting to get rewarded for more activities than just poking their heads into every corner of the world.

The Store
So what's the point of those consciousness shards, though? Yesterday I said they had no point but would soon. "Soon" meant this release, as it turned out.

In your settlements you'll now find a third guardian stone: this one being the Opal kind. Talking to this guy brings up a store where you can spend... you guessed it... consciousness shards.

The store itself serves several functions. First of all, it provides a combat-based way to get some basic supplies like upgrade stones, wood platforms, and crates. You can now kill enemies rather than exploring stash rooms if that's really your preference. I recommend still using the stash rooms for things like that and then spending your shards on cooler stuff at the store, but to each their own.

Secondly, the store acts as something of a safety valve for when the random number generator is unkind to you with enchant unlocks or some of the more central guardian powers as mission rewards (buoys, wind shelters, and seek survivors mainly). You can now spend a fairly substantial sum of shards if you wish in order to get those things outside of the normal course of missions.

Which is great for your average player who enjoys the exploration anyhow: now they have all these shards and probably not much need to spend them on basic supplies like wooden platforms or upgrade stones. So they instead get to invest those either into enchants that are hard to find, rarities like elusion scrolls, or getting more buoys without having to stalk secret missions for potentially a really long time.

In other words, the store is a way to remove some of the accidental grind that could happen simply by virtue of the world being so randomized. If you're unable to get something you absolutely need, you are no longer stuck with just having to explore ad infinitum looking for that thing: the store is your safety valve that lets you trade some combat or exploration loot (you find shards via both) for whatever you most need at the time.

There's actually a larger variety of random tweaks and fixes than usual with this one, too, so be sure to check out those release notes. There's a new music track, player bats work differently, the warp gates let you move around differently, and so on. More to come soon. Enjoy!

UPDATE:1.010 is now out.
This is basically just a cleanup maintenance patch with some hotfixes
for stuff from the last few versions, plus some extra polish we threw in
there "just because." Hopefully this is the last release prior to
Monday, when we get back down to serious business. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

This one is focused squarely on the things that most annoy players who like the game. There's more to come on that score hopefully tomorrow, but this release addresses a lot of the major complaints that we've gotten so far. That doesn't sound very exciting, but actually I think it is.

Boomsticks
First of all, there's a new enchant category called "Boomstick." It causes all of your spells to knock you backwards in shotgun-like fashion (hence the name), but also do more damage. This is something that is very much a taste-specific sort of enchant, so not everybody is going to love it. But we had a lot of players wanting this sort of playstyle, and so we did what we did with the "power sliding" ability: made it optional!
Boomstick enchants are particularly interesting underwater, because they can help you "swim" in a pretty different sort of fashion than was previously possible.

Multi-Monitor Support Improvements
With both AI War and AVWW, there's been ongoing annoyances with Unity 3D's inability to capture the mouse to the game window. It only affects people with multiple monitors, but that describes a lot of our fanbase (hey, including us). Thanks to the hack we figured out last week, we've now been able to improve our multi-monitor support despite the underlying engine not really supporting it; these features will be coming soon to AI War as well.Windstorms!
So, windstorms -- and particularly wind shelter missions -- have been the bane of a lot of players' existence. Hard barely begins to describe them, as they were near-impossible if you didn't use tricks like turning yourself into a bat.
We've listened to a lot of player feedback, and come up with something that wraps together a lot of the more interesting suggestions along with ideas of our own. The wind is now life-sapping from you rather than something that buffs monsters, and it gets worse the further into windstorm territory you go on the world map.

The life-sap won't outright kill you, though; so it's not a true timer. It won't take you below 1 health, and it also gets smaller and smaller in the effect it has on you the lower your health gets. So it's this constant drain on you that requires you to kill enemies to keep your health at reasonable levels, but it's not something that just ends you outright if you dawdle around or take your time.

Going along with this, ports now work differently in windstorms, the wind shelter missions themselves have been fixed up substantially to be better balanced, and turning yourself into a bat now comes with severe consequences in the storms. See the release notes for the details.

Anachronism Missions, Take Three
The reflected damage wasn't popular with these. It was an improvement over the older way of doing things, I think, but it was still too easy to kill yourself accidentally. The new system is more forgiving of stray shots, and instead penalizes you with two newly-spawned monsters if you kill the wrong kind of monster. We'll see what folks think!

Note that we know this wasn't the most-hated mission type -- that belonged to the supply depot missions by a longshot. I'd hoped to have my changes in for that mission type today, but the windstorm changes really were more involved than I expected because I kept finding new things to improve. So the supply depot mission improvements should be hitting tomorrow instead, knock on wood. Multiplayer Stuff
New admin commands, bug fixes, and some new keybinds to make sharing your goodies with allies easier. Nice!

Consciousness Shards
Substantial changes here. Rather than there being six colors, there is now only one. They also aren't used for guardian power scrolls anymore -- in fact, for this release they are temporarily pointless. They also aren't stored in the settlement stockpile, but rather go inside your main inventory now. Curious, eh?
We have some cool stuff planned for these that I think everybody will really like, and our hope is to get that in place tomorrow... but we'll just see how the schedule goes because people are constantly asking us for stuff and that can kind of throw our anticipated schedule out of whack as we adjust on the fly. One way or another it's coming soon, anyway.

As usual, there was a variety of random other tweaks and fixes in this one; we didn't get to remotely everything we had hoped to pack into this release, but so it goes. There's always tomorrow! More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

Our friend Lewie P. is celebrating the fifth anniversary of his bargain games site SavyGamer, and in effort to spread the love around he's organized a nice promotion that has several developers offering significant discounts on their titles over the next week.

Using the coupon code "SavyGamer5" when purchasing AI War Alien Bundle (or any of its products) and/or Tidalis on the Arcen Store will net you savings on par with our past massive discount promotions. The same code (or in a few cases no code at all) will score you great savings on great indie titles from some of our good friends as well:

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

This one is filled with all sorts of awesome new features, if I do say so.

Loot Goals / Shopping Lists
These are the most obvious new feature, and something that players have been requesting pretty heavily. So you want to get spells A, B, and C -- those each have various component ingredients that you need to find. Each of those ingredients is found in various locales. That's a lot to remember!

Flipping back and forth into the Big Honkin' Encyclopedia in-game is really a pain if you're trying to hunt down a lot of stuff in that way. It's great for when you need to look something up occasionally, but not handy for constant in-and-out navigation tips.

What the Loot Goals let you do is basically say "I want spells A, B, and C." Then the ingredients that make up those spells show up in a new little "Loot Goals" sidebar whenever you hit the Escape key. You can then see all sorts of data about each ingredient, including how many you need to collect to meet your self-set crafting goals, where to find them, and exactly what spells these ingredients are contributing towards.

You can even do this with the various kinds of items in the Where To Find Stuff You Want supplies sections! See the release notes for details.

Texture Packs
Some players have expressed a desire to be able to create custom texture packs for the game, and given the nature of how this game loads files that's something that we were able to reasonably accommodate. So this version of the game now supports swapping out specific images, whole new image sets, new particle effect logic, and so on -- anything you like.

I'll be curious to see what results from this; just please don't post anything that infringes on another company's or individual's copyright!

Mission Seeding Improvements
On the second continent and beyond, players were often getting way too many "personality structures" as mission rewards, and not enough of the other kinds of guardian powers. Similarly, on any continent sometimes one mission type could still overwhelm the world map mission breakdown more than was healthy.

A lot of improvements have been made here to make all that "just work," and the details are on the release notes. I'm sure that even further tweaking could well be warranted, so let us know what you think as you get a chance to try it out!

As usual, there was a variety of random other tweaks and fixes in this one. More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.